Jully Seema Senteu
Kenyan chemical engineer–turned–conservation strategist Jully Seema Senteu has made the Maasai Mara her laboratory for proving that rigorous data can rescue fragile ecosystems. Raised amid Narok’s savannahs, she swapped refinery plans for fieldwork after witnessing unchecked land conversion, earning a county posting as Director of Environment, where she drafted waste-management bylaws and piloted satellite-based rangeland mapping that slashed illegal charcoal burning. In 2019 she launched One Mara Research Hub, the region’s first platform weaving together more than 200 biologists, social scientists and community scouts to feed real-time findings straight into local policy.
Now pursuing a PhD in conservation ecology, Senteu harnesses drone imagery and machine-learning models to predict wildlife-corridor bottlenecks before they spark human–elephant conflict. Grants from the Rufford Foundation and USAID have already helped scale her corridor-restoration pilots to three counties, and she briefs parliament on aligning Kenya’s climate-adaptation agenda with grassroots science. Next up: an open-access biodiversity atlas for the Greater Mara and a green-jobs fellowship that trains pastoralist youth as field technicians. Her career argues a simple premise: when communities own the numbers, they’ll fight to keep their landscapes alive.